The 20 best travel books of all time

To celebrate World Book Day, read Telegraph Travel's pick of the 20 most
inspiring travel books of all time

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

This book should come with a health warning aimed particularly at those in
their formative years: proceed with caution, you may never be able to settle
in one place again. And you might take up hitch-hiking. On The Road features
a series of trips made by Kerouac and his Beat Generation friends across
America in the years after the Second World War. Through the eyes of
narrator Sal Paradise (Kerouac himself) the reader is transported from New
York to Denver to San Francisco and LA. Along the way there’s jazz, poetry
and drugs. And there’s Dean Moriarty, whose incredible thirst for life (and
women) gives the book its extraordinary momentum. “The only people in life
for me are the mad ones... the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles,” says Sal of
his explosive travelling companion. And with those words, a thousand trips
were launched...